KECMANOVIĆ: BiH RETURNED TO THE FOCUS OF INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION

BELGRADE, JULY 4 /SRNA/ – Political scientist Nenad Kecmanović says it is still unclear what the outcome of the selection of a new High Representative for BiH will be, but that, given the current global political circumstances, the very fact that BiH has returned to the focus of international attention is significant.

"Banja Luka is already counting it as an interim result that /Christian/ Schmidt has left and that the `patient on the Miljacka`, alongside Ukraine and Iran, has returned to the focus of international attention. Isn't that something?" Kecmanović said. According to him, BiH is once again historically becoming one of the arenas where global powers measure their strength, but while this influences the fate of its three constituent peoples, developments on the ground also, in turn, affect the outcome of those rivalries. "The two-national FBiH does not function, the three-national BiH functions even less, while only the predominantly single-national Republika Srpska functions. It does not take much wisdom to draw a rational conclusion," Kecmanović said. He stresses that the current era is one of the restoration of state sovereignty, secure borders, the revival of national traditions, the strengthening of ethnic identities, and a return to religion and family values, marking the end of neoliberal globalism. "That process is unfolding more slowly than we would like, but it is up to small countries and nations to actively keep pace with it," Kecmanović said. He also asked why the Peace Implementation Council /PIC/ would be expected to accomplish within the next two weeks what it had failed to do by promissed June 30 deadline - agree on a candidate for the next High Representative for BiH. "The current tug-of-war between the United States and the EU /Germany and France/ could be interesting to observe, even to take some satisfaction from, considering that the collective West has systematically and jointly mistreated the Serbs ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, when that internal split does not once again play out at the expense of the Serbs in BiH," Kecmanović wrote in an op-ed for daily Politika, titled "What Will Be the Outcome of the Dispute Over the High Representative for BiH?" He emphasized the question remains whether Germany, acting on behalf of the European Union within the PIC, would dare push through its own candidate against the wishes of the three superpowers, while risking having that decision overturned in the UN Security Council. "There will be no Germany on the East River, as it failed even to secure a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council, while its less aggressive allies, France and Britain, will find themselves facing the three superpowers - China, the Russian Federation and the United States," Kecmanović said. For that reason, he says, there is such the European Union’s high engagement in BiH, where numerous envoys who have visited Sarajevo have now been joined by most aggressive Kaja Kallas, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, “ostensibly ahead of the upcoming elections and European prospects of BiH, which, incidentally, are nonexistent".